He was somewhere in the South Atlantic when a friend texted him about an outbreak on a cruise: “Please tell me you’re not on this ship.”
By Akash Kapur
Video courtesy the author
Six weeks ago, on a cold and overcast afternoon in Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina, a scientist with a passion for birds boarded the M.V. Hondius, a polar cruise ship with a fortified hull. More than a hundred passengers and sixty-one crew members were scheduled to visit some of the most remote places on Earth: the Antarctic territories of South Georgia Island and Gough Island; Tristan da Cunha, known as the world’s most isolated inhabited location; a landmass called Inaccessible Island; and St. Helena, where Napoleon was exiled. In early May, the Hondius would dock in the African archipelagic nation of Cape Verde. “It’s literally the trip of a lifetime,” the scientist later told me.
During the expedition’s first ten days, the ship navigated a strong storm, with ocean swells reaching two to three metres. Still, the sights were remarkable. “Lot of good remote birds!” the scientist texted friends. Then one of them sent him a link to a news story about an outbreak of a hantavirus, a potentially deadly pathogen traditionally carried by rodents, which had been reported on a cruise ship. “Please tell me you’re not on this ship,” the friend wrote. The Hondius was now in a different kind of storm—an ordeal reminiscent of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with passengers mysteriously falling ill, health workers wearing hazmat suits, and governments imposing quarantines.
As the crisis unfolded, I began trading WhatsApp messages with the scientist multiple times a day. (I agreed to omit identifying details because he was concerned about being subjected to a media frenzy.) On May 8th, we spoke for almost five and a half hours. At one point, he told me about photographs that he took while waiting to board the ship. “I’m looking at these photos of people in line who were strangers,” he said. “Now I know the faces of every single one. Some of them are friends, and some of them are, unfortunately, dead.”
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